


The Essence of Time

by FirenationMoonseeker



Series: Moonseeker - The Essence of Time [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: F/M, Good Lotor (Voltron), Lotor Fixit, Lotor Rift Rescue, lotor escape
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-20
Updated: 2018-12-20
Packaged: 2019-09-23 12:15:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17080175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FirenationMoonseeker/pseuds/FirenationMoonseeker
Summary: Lotor has been injured in the rift during the explosion. The energy of the blast creates ripples in spacetime alerting Moonseeker, a timebender. She ventures out to rescue Lotor, only to find him fused with the rift creature. Will she be able to save him?





	The Essence of Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [The_Cat_Whisperer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Cat_Whisperer/gifts).



The meeting had started early morning. The Ghernese ambassador had held his hour long commencement speech and the Olkari had listened carefully without interrupting. During the break Moonseeker hat ventured outside to get some fresh air, the Ghernese atmosphere contained more CO2, which made her drowsy. She looked at the exotic trees outside the meeting venue. Inside everyone was enjoying refreshments, but for her nature was more important than snacks and drinks.

  
Moonseeker walked towards a pond where long snakelike creatures were elegantly swimming in circles. She looked into the clear water and saw her own reflection. But suddenly the image changed. There was another face, looking up at her. "Help me!" He seemed distressed, engulfed in an explosion of white light. Something pink streamed into the view und blurred the sight. Moonseeker held her ears when she heard him scream. The scream penetrated her consciousness. She felt, what he felt and fell to the ground writhing in pain and screaming for her life.  
Moonseeker was a non-ageing timebender. She felt ripples in spacetime. Whenever there was a disturbance in the fabric of time she had visions, nausea and then she would see all possible outcomes. The whole process usually strained her so, that she lost consciousness and in her dreams she would explore the problem, travel to distant futures to find the point in time to make the most favourable change.

  
Heyfried her first officer was used to these episodes. They were supposed to leave immediately when a vision occurred, so she gave orders to the med team to transport the still unconscious Moonseeker on their ship while she excused her from the meeting with the Olkari and the Ghernese. The ship was a time travelling mid-class transporter with a crew of 20 scientists / medics and 80 soldiers which had been hand picked by Moonseeker herself. Most of them came from distant times and planets and she had picked them up on her adventures. Heyfried watched as the Medics strapped Moonseeker off from the stretcher and moved her into her bed in the medic bay.  
Moonseeker was dreaming. A gigantic rift in spacetime, full of energy... quintessence. She felt it radiate through her and in the middle of it a ship that looked like a man. A mecha? There was a person in the seat of the mecha. He was pushed into the seat by the forces of an enormous blast which literally ignited the quintessence. Moonseekers eyes were wide open. She felt the pain and screamed while the medical staff around her tried to figure out what was happening to her. Her vital signs were getting weaker. She approached the vessel in her dream. The man in the seat was consumed by burning quintessence and something else. And then it stopped. As with all explosions in space the lack of oxygen and air limited the impact of the fire.  
He lived. The man in the seat was alive, but what had happened to him. What was this? "Help me...", she heard him think. He was nonverbal and immobile, fused to the seat by the thing which had taken over and consumed him. She felt his thoughts. He was the Galra Emperor Lotor... His heart was beating fast, he was in pain. She talked to him. Faintly. Would he feel her presence? He continued to scream, but then suddenly he was calm.

  
There was another voice in the conversation. The rift creature was talking to him. They were one now and Lotor, ever the curious explorer and trained in the Galra way of pain control, ignored his distress and ventured forward in his mind to explore what the rift creature would show him...

  
 ***

  
The doctor gave Heyfried an update on Moonseekers status. Heyfried nodded slowly. If she only knew where to go... She sat down at Moonseekers bedside. "Commander, who needs our help?" Moonseeker was mumbling faintly. Oriadne... This was better than nothing. They knew from the Olkari where Oriadne was and set course.  
A few hours later Moonseeker had recovered of her vision and had taken up her command again on the bridge. She was still weak, but strong enough to plan the operation. Heyfried filled her in on the course and Moonseeker gave a briefing to her crew about her visions. Heyfried used hypnosis on Moonseeker to find out all the details of her visions. This had proven successful to pinpoint the problem and possible solution strategies.

  
H: Breathe slowly...  
M: Mhm...  
H: The man... do you see his face?  
M: Yes...  
H: Is he of any of the known spacefaring people?  
M:    He looks Galra... but different... white hair...Altean... Lotor...  
H:     Lotor, the Emperor Lotor? What is he doing?  
M:     He is in a pilot seat...  
H:     Can you identify the type of ship?  
M:     He is in pain! I need to help him. He is in pain! I feel his pain. H: Calm down... breathe in and out, slowly, like this. In and out. Fine.  
Moonseeker calmed down again. Her breathing stabilized. Heyfried sighed and tried it again:  
H:     Do you see what kind of ship it is?  
M:     A mecha. He's in the seat but there is this thing with him... and all energy, white... quintessence.  
H:     Quintessence... is it around him? Is he in open space?  
M:     No, he's in the rift. The rift is full of voices. It eats things, whole planets with all that lives. I can hear the voices, so many....

  
Heyfried checked Moonseeker's vital statistics. She was still very fragile, Yet, the first officer continued the tedious interrogation. She tried to understand what happened to Moonseeker, but she could only guess. Time was not linear, it was bent and folded and somehow Moonseeker had the ability to see ahead, just as others would look back upon memories. She was also able to act upon them and her sense of responsibility made her fix things, almost compulsively. She was very empathic and felt the pain of other people as if she had been hurt herself, their fear, their anger, their despair.  
Heyfried patted Moonseeker's hand. She silently wondered why Moonseeker had wanted to go to Oriadne if Lotor was trapped in a Quintessence field. The crew informed Heyfried that they had reached the quadrant in which Oriadne was located. She snapped with her fingers and woke Moonseeker up.  
Moonseeker had a slight headache like always after a vision. She drank a lot of water to stay hydrated to get the headache away and was compulsively writing down every detail she could remember of her vision. She sketched out the ship... Sincline... the position of the pilot capsule and the seat and the pinkish thing that had entered the capsule during the explosion to coat Lotor and somehow even protect him from the blast itself. She started painting Lotor in the seat, pink strands of the creature protruding everywhere, sucking out his energy but also filling him with something new. Pure Quintessence.

  
They flew into the quadrant where Oriadne was located without any clue what they were looking for. When they reached Oriadne's perimeter they hid by activating their time cloaking shield which hid the ship in a timefold undetectable to Galra technology. The Galra were only dominant due to their application of Altean magic fused with quintessence, but that was just the beginning of fourth dimension technology encompassing spacetime fluctuations and timebending. Moonseeker's ship was used to travel through time and space. They would wait. An hour later there were ripples in spacetime.

  
A wormhole appeared and Haggar's ship flew through it only to approach the atmosphere of Oriadne and stay in orbit like a satellite circling the planet. They opened the loading bay and dragged the Sincline out. Heyfriend's analysis showed that Lotor was still strapped onto the seat and showed patterns similar to life. But it was unclear if the living entity was Lotor himself or the other creature. The Sincline was in a protective shield and was towed by a smaller transport vessel. They were planning to land on Oriadne near the Pyramid.  
Moonseeker assembled a tact team of ten soldiers. She would head the first team, the other two would spread out around the pyramid and wait for further instructions. To land undetected, they waited until the planet showed its night side and docked their cloaked pods directly under the Galra cruisers heading for the planet surface. Their pods were small enough to be identified as part of the Galra ship itself by its scanners. Once they entered the atmosphere, on 1500m they ejected themselves. The heat during landing would cloak their thermal or electromagnetic signature. The pods opened their parachutes and in the dead of the night Moonseekers crew landed. Team one would enter the pyramid, team two would aquire a transport vessel and three would be backup waiting to intervene if they needed assistance. The goal was to bust Lotor out as discreetly as possible.

  
The witch Haggar had the Sincline moved into the pyramid. She spent some time there and Moonseeker hoped that she was not experimenting on her own son. Several transport vessels of the Galra had landed on the ground in the perimeter of the pyramid. Finally she appeared at the entrance of the pyramid, alone. Her Galra sentries had remained inside. She boarded the transport vessel and flew away. Heyfried confirmed that the Galra ship had opened a wormhole and they had positively left the quadrant.  
Was the pyramid a grave for Lotor? Had she displayed him like the olden Alteans would display their passed kings? But he wasn't dead yet... Moonseeker still felt a connection to Lotor. There were still signs of life coming from the hall. They needed to know.

  
Moonseeker did not like long fights. She always aimed for maximum impact with her first strike to get things over with. Swiftly her tact team took out four Galra guards without making too much noise. Now the path was clear to the center of the pyramid where Lotor was. But how much time would they have? There were surely Galra ground troops around the pyramid. They'd have to be quick. Her team secured all entrances to the hall while Moonseeker stepped in. As a timebender she was not very susceptible to quintessence or general spacetime fluctuations. She first had considered to travel back in time and rescue Lotor before the impact, but it had been clear to her that she did not have enough time to convince him and not be blasted away herself. This was the only course of action which would contain a minimal chance of success.

  
Moonseeker looked at the grisly display in front of her. Lotor was sitting in the seat, fully covered in molten something. His white hair all covered with roots. Moonseeker expected to smell decay but the smell was oddly chemical, like ozone or burnt ions. The body was not rotting, but he was emaciated. Had he been preserved? Was he still alive? Cautiously Moonseeker approached the seat. Lotor had fused with the rift creatures and she felt life. But whose life was this? Moonseeker extended a hand and touched Lotors fingers which still clutched the gearshift. She felt consciousness. Yet there was no way she would be able to do anything to separate the entity from Lotor here without risking his life. She tried to make contact with him by whispering his name first, then she meditated and tried to find him in the astral plane. But all she heard was a million voices coming from the rift creature. Where was Lotor? They needed space and time. It had been obvious that Haggars Altean magic hadn't worked. She only knew to apply Quintessence. But to extract it? To extract only rift creature energy without harming the underlying organism? It would take days if not weeks to find a safe way. And maybe she would fail. She didn't want to think about failure. They'd get Lotor out.

  
She called on their backup teams who in the meantime had captured one of the Galra transport vessels and put on Galra uniforms. They entered the pyramid and transported the seat with Lotor into the transport vessel and they flew at low height undeaneath the radar until they were far enough to ascend to the planet's orbit. Haggars ship was gone, but the ground transporters were able to detect vessels exiting the atmosphere, so they waited until dawn when at least the visual tracking systems were the weakest. Their window of opportunity was narrow, they had to ascend and fly quickly to Moonseekers ship which would already have prepared for a spacetime jump. The Galra had noticed their ascent and Lotors disappearance. The transporter slowed down and flew into Moonseekers ship which had opened the aft dock. Within minutes they did the time jump.

  
The only time in space they were safe was at a time when Haggar was a child. The laws of spacetime forbid that the same people live twice in the same time. Haggar would not be able to access the timeline they were heading for. They'd have fourty years time between Haggars youth and Lotors birth to fix things.  
  
  



End file.
